Two Steps Toward Managing a Virtual Environment

The virtual environment you understood five years ago has transformed, growing in size, handling more critical applications, and boasting most of the accolades for improving agility for many organizations. As companies, and especially IT, continue to bring new services into their growing, heterogeneous environment, we’re taking a look at two ways you can better manage your virtual environment.

Even though you have diversified environments, you want to manage them in a similar way. And you want tool sets that cross over those environments so you’re not hopping from one tool to the next as you’re changing environments.

For example, if you’re responsible for capacity, you want one view of your open capacity across the heterogeneous, virtual environments. That’s key because there might be other reasons why you’re running a heterogeneous virtual environment where you could potentially re-use capacity that’s available on A or move something from A to B if more capacity is needed.

Cover the whole environment

Get a unified tool set that can manage all of my environments for a particular aspect be that performance capacity, day-to-day management, provisioning or whatever that may be.

Unfortunately, OEM vendors are unable to thoroughly cover heterogeneous virtual environments. VMware is a good example. The ISVs narrows down to a handful of people that can cover the hetero virtual environment.

From a capacity and performance perspective, understand why you have all these different environments and what are your business practices around that. Can you actually move stuff between one system and another?

Think about the apps

Ask yourself why you have so many environments. Is the risk profile of the applications that you’re hosting different from one virtual platform to the other? For example, should you put all of your high risk or low-tolerance risk applications in VMware and put the ones that are less critical in Hyper-V or KVM?

It’s important to understand the maturity of your people and processes. In a recent survey, 83% of IT managers surveyed say their company lacks proper virtual machine management. Nearly three in four IT managers think IT risk would shrink if they had proper virtual machine management.

Take charge of performance and capacity management at your organization today.

Requesting a demo, trial, or more information about the software is a great next step.